Keith’s Blog

Unnoticeable, it has come to my last Sunday in the Bay. Sometimes all it matters is the little bits and pieces that you experience every week but only pick up when it’s soon going to be history. First thing was tennis with Cliff in the drizzle. Then went to the Victoria Hotel to watch the once-every-Sunday firing of the canon ball to “warn the French”.

All it was was a puff of white smoke and a huge explosion bang.

Told Tom about Hong Kong and showed him where I lived and no surprise shocked him that people actually live on the 20th floor. Night ended with a great English dinner featuring Yorkshire pudding prepared by Ann, the only (professional) cook in the Southcombe family.

Boiled Carrots, Baked Potatoes, Lamb, Boiled Potatoes and Fruit Pudding

Legendary Yorkshire Pudding

A collage of photos I took of dishes I made over the past 5 weeks …

The big thing this week was meeting with the British Council in London. The main purpose of the meeting was to determine its three-year plan to promote social enterprise globally. Pilot training workshops on setting social enterprises have received very positive feedback from participants almost anywhere. Governments have also been very supportive as they have begun to realise that social enterprises have huge potential in bringing about social changes that could save lots of taxpayer money every year. As stated before, social enterprises are businesses so they are financially independent like any other businesses but use its profits in funding projects that brings about social changes in communities.

A place for freedom of expression - Fourth Plinth Trafalgar Square (Learn more)

Where Cliff rallied against excessive development in the 70s.
Little know about this now, not even Wikipedia notes about it.

The last stop of our long journey to London brought me to what they call it a “Hub”. A hub is a meeting place for people working in social enterprises where they could talk about upcoming business plans, partnership opportunities and at the same time enjoy a sip of Cappuccino from the café. The place is nicely decorated and located right across London King’s Cross Station. The three stories building has meeting rooms, plenty of power points and the ground floor can even host various events, including company balls. I think they should have something similar in Hong Kong for teens to meet up and talk about anything under the sun.

Power more, power up!

Tried to help write up grant application proposals though did not make too much progress. But I did learn that grant applications not only can be tedious, but could also be a huge investment to small and medium size organisation. Applications often are lengthy and involve a lot of paper work that pose a huge burden on small scale organisations that have limited resources available for grant applications. And often, large organisations have money to hire professional writers that specialises in drafting proposals to cater for the marking scheme. So to adjudication panels that blindly follow the marketing criteria and know little about the operation of third sector organisations, these “ghost-written” proposals may appear to be much more attractive. Biased and discriminatory it is, many grants and funding bodies still relies heavily on stringent marking schemes that does not reflect the social impact various applying projects have. It seems to me that granting bodies are more interested in making sure that projects they fund would look good on their annual reports than to actually help their intended beneficiaries.

Following Cliff to a grant introduction meeting gave me a chance to discover the city of Newcastle. While I have not really been to the city centre, I did manage to walk on the Millennium Bridge, visit the Gateshead Sage and the BALTIC. The Millennium Bridge lifts (rotates) allowing bigger ships to come through and provides a great view over the Gateshead and Newcastle riverside.

Cliff and I had a discussion the other day about the way people like to work things out. He generalised it into two types, Type A and B:

We both agreed that we belong to Type B, that is we tend to scribble around before the deadline or going off track for most of the time but right before the deadline we speed things up and just get it done within 1/10 the time we spent so far to complete everything.

While we yet to conclude which is the better way of working things out, I guess majority of us are Type B so there has to be a reason for Type B dominance. Could it be because we are all lazy and are laid back at the beginning or is it because we know we do not stick to our plans anyway so it is better off sorting things out on our way? What do you think? Which type are you?

I can’t help remembering the over three hours bus ride before I could get to the cultural, financial and commercial heart of the wider West Yorkshire Urban Area - Leeds. First it was the #93 bus that I was supposed to take to Scarborough (which I ended up missing) left 4 minutes earlier than scheduled while the next bus came 8 minutes late. Then it was the #843 bus to Leeds via York which, if you have been following this blog, is the same one I took a week ago to York so you could except me dosing off while the bus wriggle along the countryside, repeating the 2/3 journey I took last week.

I was impressed by the free bus service that circulates the city centre, allowing you to hop on and off at the railyway station, Leeds University, Victoria Quarter and many more touristy attractions. But to find a free map of the city might be a little bit more difficult. I got mine (a Leeds Walking Guide printed by the City Council) at an unnoticed corner of the Leeds Visitor Centre located at Leeds Railway Station.

The city felt a bit strange to me (it might just be me) but the attractions were rather deserted, the only place where people crowd around is the Victoria Qauter, where all the brand name stores showcase their latest fashions. I guess the vibrant side of the city happens at night near Corn Exchange though I didn’t get to try that out this time.

First attempt to cook for 5 in Chinese style.

The menu for Cliff and his family was:

Shanghainese style dumplings with noodles (上海韭菜餃子粗麵)

Minced Pork
Leeks
Ready-made Dumpling Wraps
Shanghainese Soup Noodles
Tiny bit of Soya Sauce and Sesame Oil

Pork Chop with Onions (洋蔥豬扒)

Pork Chop
Onions
Black Pepper and Soya Sauce

Curry Chicken with Potatoes (咖喱薯仔雞翼)
Chicken Thigh
Potatoes
Curry Powder

Tangyuan (湯圓)
Ginger Pieces
Tangyuan
Sugar

Not so much travelling to do this week and the only meeting was at York Priory Street Centre handing out information to advisors on the Modernisation Fund.

Most of the time I was working on modifying existing guides on social auditing to fit them into the Governance Router Master web platform. Ongoing emails with our Swedish software engineer. The platform is slowly forming its shape and hopefully would be completed before we meet with the British Council in London less than two weeks ahead.

On a side note: I have cycled to the cliffs you can see from the header of this blog at Ravenscar. The cycle track is along the old railway line from Whitby to Scarborough which has been disused for some time and the tracks have been removed and sold. Ravenscar is located slightly higher than Robin Hood’s Bay in terms of altitude and can take up to twice the amount of time to go uphill. But scenery (on a sunny day) would prove the journey worthy. Here are some photos I took on my way: (click with scrolling wheel to open in window, photos hosted on Picasa Web Album)

The trade-off of living in an exotic isolated village is that travelling around the country can either be time consuming or expensive. But nonetheless, I went to York by first taking bus 93 to Scarborough and continue West on bus 843 to York Rail Station. Fives hours and £16.70 in total for a two-way journey, still affordable for a young man.

York is a former walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city was named by the Roman some 1900 years ago. The city isn’t that large in size, well, at least in a tourist’s point of view. The main attractions include the second-highest office of the Church of England - York Minster, the city walls that surrounds the old part of the roman town, the Clifford’s Tower which stood for more than 700 years.

You can take a look at the photos I have taken in York by clicking on one of the following thumbnails: (click with scrolling wheel to open in window, photos hosted on Picasa Web Album)

Monday & Tuesday – Working at the office that overlooks the Bay area while updating the guides in the Governance Route Master (GRM). Finally, I got hold of the software which creates the entire web platform and slowly trying to understand the complicated codes and tabs.

Wednesday – Meeting with a director of a venture company which manages several social enterprises in Middlesbrough. By listening to the ongoing conversations, an innovative idea called social licenses caught my attention. The idea can be easily illustrated with a diagram:

As you can see, between the social enterprise and an individual entrepreneur, there exists what we call a social license or a mutual agreement. In layman terms, the social enterprise offers resources (which can be in forms of tools, equipments or even workspaces) purchased from its own funding or grants to individual entrepreneur that seeks to open or expand their own business. In exchange, the entrepreneur would commit himself/herself to an agreed means of contribution to the community. Such contribution often is aligned with the social objectives of the social enterprise.

Through such licensing agreement, both the social enterprise and the entrepreneur would benefit. Imagine a social enterprise that forms ten social licenses with ten different entrepreneurs, more community contributions can now be made and the social objectives that the social enterprise is founded on would be more effective achieved and thus, increases their chance of obtaining grants or loans from third parties, e.g. governments. Entrepreneurs benefit from the lowered start up cost and at the same time can increase their ties with the local community, driving more potential customers to their business.

Thursday – Headed down to Sheffield where a regional consultation with the Conservative party on the voluntary action in the 21st century. I was very pleased to see that political parties in the UK have actually taken the third sector (i.e. non-business, non-governmental organisations) very seriously and tried to formulate more third sector-friendly government policies which mainly aim at reducing bureaucracies but at the same time maintaining the accountability towards its people. Due to the lack of understanding of the nature of work the third sector has committed itself, the economic value of the sector is often not emphasized. Furthermore, the diversity within the sector sometimes makes obtaining funding for individual organisations more difficult and selection criteria are often not as dynamic so as to reflect the reality.

Here is a thought-provoking quote from Cliff in a question he asked from the floor:

We (the third sector) did not create the financial crises, it was the bloody bankers. But why are we responsible for taking care of the mess with highly limited resources?

A summary of the consultation paper is typed out in this Google Docs document.

Friday – The stakeholder analysis in the GRM is finally up and running in the web platform except several minor tweaks to work on.

That’s about it for this week …